During
the afternoon, snow began to fall. It had that windblown, leaden look of a
major storm. Those who could, slipped out of their offices early to beat the
traffic. Few cities in the world suffer more in snowstorms than Washington. The
view from the big windows in the office of the Secretary of Defense, out over
the Tidal Basin and the Potomac, was wintry and beautiful. A heavy curtain was
falling on the end of an era. Men who had been in Washington since the days of
Franklin D. Roosevelt were planning to leave, or at least to retire from the
daily commitment to government.

In
1960 Washington had become a rather shabby city. The massive government
buildings stood stark and cold. The many parks and monuments had been neglected
by the aged tenants, who had grown too accustomed to their appearance. No one
noticed any longer how drab the whole city had become. They never remembered it
any other way. It was evident everywhere that this was the end of an era. An
era of depression and recovery; of major war, victory and hopeful peace; of the
atom bomb and of worldwide, instant communications. An era of great depths and
an era that had the promise of great heights. But all of its leaders were now
old and spiritless. Their great moment, those years of preparation for the
ultimate summit conference and for the crusade for peace, had come to a
shattering end. Now, in the shambles of that dream, that weary generation was
turning over the mantle of government, the greatest government the world has
ever known, to a young man who was barely a youngster when they had first come
to Washington. And as many of the old stalwarts gathered in the office of the
Secretary of Defense to say their farewells to him and to the world of great
power they knew so well, they looked for the last time out over the Potomac
into the sweeping and deepening snow as the night, and history, closed over
them.

As if
to presage the change that was taking place beneath the surface of the
glittering events, the streets of Washington had been plowed, shovelled, and
swept clear of all snow for the inaugural parade, not by the municipal
equipment other cities would have used, but by the U.S. Army and its heavy equipment.
The Kennedy Administration owed its very inaugural festivities to the might of
the U.S. Army, to its stealthy appearance by night into the streets of the city
- a United States city. And this was part of the new era, too. Subtle changes,
which had been under way, began to burst forth into the open with the
inauguration.

From
the first, changes were visible. The Kennedy team had been together through a
tough and long battle. Their operational procedures were honed and ready. There
was a Kennedy way and there was the other way. They changed Washington a lot
with the Kennedy way. Eisenhower had been precise in his administrative
practices. He had made great use of the National Security Council and of the
implementing support of the Operations Coordinating Board. His decisions were
the product of open and free discussion in the NSC chambers; and then having
been made, those decisions were followed up by the OCB to assure their proper
accomplishment within the Government. But Kennedy saw no real need for the NSC
method. In the beginning he did not recognize and understand its usefulness and
significance. When he wanted something done, he called upon one of his close
friends, even upon one of his relatives, and after a brief discussion, they
would go out and do what he had directed. This system can work in an Operation
such as the campaign had been, where the campaign team is the whole
organization. However, in any organization as large and as immobile as the
ponderous U.S. Government, this system is quite ineffective and leaves much
undone and uncontrolled. It tends to leave tens of thousands of lesser
bureaucrats on their own and to their own devices. It encourages the stagnation
of the bureaucrat, and the catastrophe of the irresponsible in action.

Almost
immediately following the inauguration, the ST saw that the door was wide open.
With practically no NSC meetings, and therefore no Council to effectively
control the CIA, there was no application of those crucial parts of the
National Security Act of 1947 that require the NSC to direct the Agency.
Without such direction and control, the CIA was practically free to act on its
own.

Few
men in the new Government had any idea of what was being put into shape for the
Cuban invasion. Those who did knew only bits and pieces of the whole plan.
These men were not accustomed to the double­talk and undercover language and
actions of the Agency. They heard briefings, but they did not know what they
really meant. On the other hand, a large number of the new Kennedy team were
old CIA hands. They did know exactly what was going on, and they used their
special knowledge and experience to further isolate those who did not.

There
is a peculiar and dangerous characteristic that derives from the continuing
application of secrecy. In an open government such as this country has been
accustomed to having, it is only natural to believe that if a man is a fire-
fighter, then his job has to do with putting out fires; and if he is a soldier,
then his job is being prepared for war. In a simpler sense, Government workers
are trained to expect that if the men in the next office are working on the
Military Aid Program for Pakistan, then those men are doing that work.
Customarily, if they meet those occupants of that next door office in the snack
bar or at the dining hall, they might be expected to ask them how things are
going on in "Pakistan".

Now
if the men who are supposed to be working on the Pakistan aid program are not
working on that program at all, but are actually working on a special support
program for the border police of India, and the Pakistan aid program is simply
a cove r story, then whatever they tell their office neighbors is part of their
cover story too. In other words, it is false - more plainly, a lie. However,
they justify that lie as being permissible, in fact necessary, because they
have been told that the "border police project" is highly classified
and that they cannot tell anyone about it. So if you are on a classified
project, it is all right, in fact it is essential, for you to lie. So you lie,
the other man lies, everyone lies. But it is all supposed to be for the good of
the cause.

Over
a period of time this can develop many strange situations too involved to
mention here; but one or two examples may be useful. In the pentagon there are
many offices established to do one thing. They really do not do that thing at
all, but something entirely different. As a result, there are hundreds and even
thousands of men who either cannot say what they are doing; or if they are
forced to say something, they must lie. The polite thing is to say that they
are "following their cover story".

This
can lead to further complications. Even within the cover Story scheme there
will be factions. Some men may be working on a certain project with a cover
story, and others may be working on exactly the same project under another
cover story; and neither group will know about the other. Later, when the
Secretary or some other high official wants to be briefed, he may meet with one
group and not the other - simply because the first group did not know of the
other's existence. And he will not hear the whole story; he will hear only the
first group's version of the activity. So it is not that the new Kennedy team
was not properly briefed about anti­-Castro activities as it was a matter of
the inability of anyone briefing officer to give all the facts at one time.
There may have been no way to have rounded up all the facts and present them;
so much of what was going on was decentralized. In spite of this, each briefing
officer may have thought that he knew all the facts and that he was telling the
whole truth, as happened when Tracy Barnes was sent to give Adlai Stevenson his
briefing at the United Nations.

Other
complications crept in. Under the cover of the Bay of Pigs operation, much
bigger moves were being made. All over the world the MAP training program was
picking up volume and momentum. Thousands of foreigners from all forty
countries converged upon the United States for training and indoctrination. The
new curriculum was either the one at Fort Bragg or like it. The Army interest
in political-social-economic programs, under the general concept of
"nation building", was gaining momentum. For every class of
foreigners who were trained and indoctrinated with these ideas, there were
American instructors and American soldiers who were being brainwashed by the
very fact that they were being trained to teach this new doctrine. These
instructors did not know otherwise. To them this new non-military political,
social, and economic theme was the true doctrine of the U.S. Army. A whole
generation of the American Army has grown up with this and now believes, to one
degree or another, that the natural role of an army lies in this political
field. Also they believe that an army mixes Some medical and educational
ingredients into this nation building. They believe the army is the chosen
instrument in nation building, whether the subject be political - social,
economic or military. In many cases, due to the great emphasis the CIA placed
on training the police forces of certain foreign countries, a large number of
American servicemen who were used for such training became active in what was
really police work and not the scope of regular military work.

It
was the CIA, with help from a few other agencies, that put together the
Inter-American Police Academy during the early Kennedy years, which played such
an important part in emphasizing national police power in the nations of Latin
America. The CIA brought in police instructors from all over the United States
and from the military for this school. The success of this school, operating
covertly from an Army base in the Canal of Panama, led to other schools in the
United States that have carried on this type of work for police forces in this
country. Part of the impetus behind the great build-up in the strength of
police force all over the country dates back to this CIA police academy work
and to the other schools it spawned. This police work not only involved
training but it integrated new weapons, new procedures, and new techniques into
American police work, some of which has been good and much of which has been
quite ominous.

Anyone
who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real
and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area
around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented
specialists, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the
countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United
States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a
program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States,
such as the CIA and the U.S. Army have carried out in Indochina.

At
the same time this training program was under way, larger and larger civic
action teams a other benevolently named organizations spread throughout the
world. MAAG units were no longer small logistics and training organizations.
They had grown to large size and were frequently and almost augmented by large
units on temporary duty in the host country. This Army accounting device of
"temporary duty" is always interesting because of the way the Army
uses it. The Army may tell an unwitting Congressman or reporter that there are
50 men in the MAAG of a given country, although there may be many more men
there. The Army will justify this lie about the total number by claiming that
the extra men, sometimes many more than the regular staff, are there on
temporary duty. And of course there may even be 100 or 150 more men there, but
since they are on the CIA cover payroll, the Army won't report them either even
though they are there on Army cover. In that case there will be another
justifiable lie to protect the existence of the CIA.

All
of this is a game. The secrecy can't mean a thing to the host country, they
know exactly how many men are there and it makes no difference to them whether
they are Army, Army temporary duty, or Army cover. By the same token, the Soviet
embassy, and all other embassies, will know exactly how many Army men are
there. And to them, the fine distinction makes no difference. The only people
these devices fool are American. American reporters, American Congressmen,
American government specialists, and of course the American public. There was
almost no way in which anyone in the United States Government could unravel the
whole clandestine business. But at least a beginning was made as a result of a
most unexpected series of events and as a result of some very shrewd and clever
work by Bobby Kennedy and his closest associates.

What
had grown quietly, secretly, and almost totally unobserved within the
infrastructure of the U.S. Government was by 1961 so large that it was time to
bring it to life and give it some reason for existence. While Jack Kennedy and
Bobby Kennedy were seriously pondering what had gone wrong with the Bay of Pigs
operation, this new doctrine and new organization was emerging. It remained
necessary, then, for the Kennedys to find the master key to all of this
activity. It took the Bay of Pigs Board of Inquiry to perform this feat. The
day-by-day litany of the Board was designed to indoctrinate Bobby Kennedy and
to win him over to this new doctrine of counterinsurgency, flexible response,
civic action, nation building, and the rest - and through him, to win over the
President. While the Board was meeting day after day in the back room in the
Pentagon, something more important than the fate of the Bay of Pigs was being
discussed and elaborated upon. As witness after witness filed through the
Board's chambers Bobby Kennedy sat there saying absolutely nothing, just
soaking up the hearings and searching for cracks in the story. At the same
time, Allen Dulles and Maxwell Taylor paraded a hand-picked group of disciples
into the room for interviews and questioning. These men were selected to preach
the doctrine of the new covert intervention. Their interviews were designed to
train, indoctrinate, and to use an overworked term, even to brainwash Bobby
Kennedy. What he heard each day was the Maxwell Taylor new-military-­plan-for-flexible-response
theme, blended with the White House Committee report material, and topped off
by Allen Dulles's own theme of secret operations. This was a most heady
mixture, and it was effective. Some of the men who were called to talk about
the tactics of the Bay of Pigs had not been connected with it at all, but were
Special Forces men from the Army Staff or directly from Fort Bragg. Bobby
Kennedy emerged from the incessant catechism of the "truths" ready to
soak up the doctrine of counterinsurgency. This was to be the new watchword.
The Kennedy Administration became hooked on counterinsurgency, and the
indoctrination occurred to a good measure right there in the Board of Inquiry
process.

Thus
the inner Kennedy clan came out of the Bay of Pigs disaster with two strong
convictions. Closely held and deeply felt was the conviction that the CIA had
somehow done them in and that they had better be extremely wary of anything it
did in the future. This was a very deep feeling and only seldom revealed in any
official actions. In fact, Jack Kennedy developed a cover story of his own by
giving the appearance as much as possible in public that he could go along with
the CIA, when private actions and discussions tended to support otherwise.

The
second conviction was that the world was being divided sharply into two strong
camps in the battle between the "world of choice" and the "world
of coercion". It was President Kennedy who said to Chairman Krushchev,
"The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is
the revolution of those determined to be free." The Dulles contribution to
this philosophy was the reiteration of the Krushchev challenge to support all
wars of national liberation; and the Maxwell Taylor contribution was the simple
reflex of the counterpuncher, the plan of flexible response. Defined in terms
of the infantryman, this meant counterinsurgency.

One
of the better definitions of counterinsurgency. as practiced in the Kennedy era
was that written by a general who worked for the Secretary of Defense: "
...the technique of using, in appropriate combination, all elements of National
Power in support of a friendly government which is in danger of being
overthrown by an active Communist campaign designed to organize, mobilize and
direct discontented elements of the local population against the
government." Although counterinsurgency has been generally regarded as a
military activity, careful analysis will reveal that it is really more a
civilian-controlled action in the paramilitary area of operation. This is a
most important consideration as we observe the country moving from the
"Roosevelt-Eisenhower" era into the "Kennedy-Johnson" era,
which includes the Vietnam episode. Note also how the definition of
counterinsurgency, above, written by an Army General closely allied with the
CIA and with the authors of the President's Committee report, almost precisely
paraphrases sections of that report. In other words, the actions of this
Government, which were called counterinsurgency, were not very different from
the actions that were attributed to the Communists and called subversive
insurgency. As a matter of fact, they seemed to be identical.

This
may seem to be a fine point, but it is the key to much that has happened since
then and particularly in Vietnam. Note that the same material written by the
spokesman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense continues as follows:
"A successful counterinsurgency strategy requires, therefore, the
integration of all U.S. Government activities in the country concerned, under
the central leadership of the Ambassador or [if the local situation had
deteriorated to the point where U.S. Armed Forces are actively involved] the
military area commander. In the final analysis, the defeat of a Communist-led
insurgency hinges largely on the effectiveness of the Country Team. This
depends in great measure upon the willing cooperation of the government
departments and agencies in Washington."

When
one realizes that this was written by a man who was for years the executive
assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and in his own right an
acknowledged leader in the new Army doctrine, he begins to see that this is
another part of the pattern that was changing this country's entire traditional
idea of military action. We have a new doctrine at the Special Forces school,
we have worldwide MAP training in the political­-social-economic spheres, we
have the new creed dramatically spelled out by the President's Committee report
and then, to tie this all together, we have the definition of
counterinsurgency. We find the official version of counterinsurgency is not to
be confused with the more or less public idea of counterinsurgency, which
assumes that it is a form of anti-guerrilla fighting against Communist-inspired
rebels. The official doctrine of counterinsurgency states clearly that it is
carried out "under the central leadership of the ambassador". This
means that counterinsurgency is intended to be civilian directed, even though
it appears to be a military program, and that the senior man is to be the
ambassador. He is placed in charge, not actually to be the country-team commander
in chief, but to make it possible for him to delegate his authority to the CIA
station chief rather than to some senior military officer.

This
has shaped the total efforts of the United States in Vietnam for the past
decade and more. All of U.S. history prior to the past decade, more or less
followed the general principles of warfare which state that in time of peace
the Army trains for war, and during this time the affairs of the nations are
carried out by diplomats. When diplomacy fails, then the military men take over
and accomplish by military means what the politicians had been unable to
accomplish. It has always been clear that when war was the only remaining means
of accomplishing national objectives, the ambassador and his staff would leave
the scene and the generals would take over. Now here was the highest echelon of
military power in the United States stating publicly the new doctrine of the
Kennedy era to the effect that counterinsurgency (a form of war) would be
"under the central leadership of the ambassador".

Why
would a ranking U.S. Army general on a special assignment to the White House
define the new training program for mutual security, and another ranking U.S.
Army general on assignment to the Office of the Secretary of De fen se define
the new method of warfare designed to counter the Communist support of
"wars of national liberation" , and both in terms of civilian
direction of the military operations of U.S. forces? To anyone trained in the
profession of arms, this is heretical. The answer is simple, although it has
lain buried under the long years of the horrible disaster in Vietnam. Both of
these men were closely affiliated with and had served with the CIA, and both
were the type of men who make up the ST. Even though they wear the uniform of
the U.S. Army, their primary allegiance has been with the STICIA new method of
operations in peacetime. They saw that the time had come for the ST to make its
big move and for it to sweep out beyond the DOD and the CIA to form a massive
paramilitary international power under para-civilian leadership and a monstrous
cloak of security. Their words were so simple and so Boy-Scout sounding; yet
they have changed the entire world during the past decade.

They
went on to say, "The United States therefore has made the decision to
enter the lists early, to throw its national power into the counterinsurgency
campaign on the side of our allies, the local authorities. The problem of
counter-insurgency now is receiving the personal attention of the President and
his senior advisors. A major effort is being made throughout the government,
and particularly within the DOD to develop sound doctrine for the co duct of
this unorthodox form of warfare. The JCS, for example, have recently
established within the Joint Staff a special staff section dealing exclusively
with the problem of counterinsurgency. . . counterinsurgency is not susceptible
to a purely military solution. . . it requires the closest possible
coordination of political, economic, psychological, and military actions."
By the end of 1962 this nation had gone so far down the line following the
Agency, the new Special Forces doctrine, the MAP, and the new U.S. philosophy
as outlined in the President's Committee report, that it was saying openly it
was well on its way to carrying out as top national policy a major clandestine
operation so big in fact that the entire government would be involved.
Obviously, it could not be really clandestine in the sense that it would be
kept secret from our enemies; on the contrary, it was a new kind of
"clandestine", so it would be kept secret from all Americans.

When
such men stated that the war would be waged under civilian leadership, and then
named the ambassador as the commanding and senior officer, they simply were
carrying out their usual cover-story double-talk. Any such counterinsurgency
would be initiated and directed by the CIA. Of course the generals involved
would be real generals; but they would be working inside of and for the CIA -
or in some cases not exactly inside of the CIA, but certainly under its
direction. Has it ever been properly explained why this country has retained an
ambassador in Saigon since the first one was selected by the CIA to go to that
new piece of real estate, a new nation called South Vietnam, back in 1954? Why
should the longest war in which this country has ever been involved, and the
second costliest and second most destructive, have been waged through all these
futile years under the direction of an ambassador? Is it because of the above doctrine?
Is it because we entered this conflict to support what were, at first, minor
CIA operations? Then when these actions grew and grew, there never was a time
when the "war" transitioned from the clandestine operators to the
military operators. During all of these years the ambassador has remained as a
sort of minor commander in chief, one step down from the Commander-in-chief
role of the President. And this has been done so that he could serve as a
referee between the CIA and the military, the end result being that neither one
of them has been really in complete control since 1964, when the first Marines
arrived in Vietnam. Before that, the CIA was in control of operations, while
the military played a logistics role and perfunctorily acted the part of a
military organization.

At
that time, 1963-1964, the ambassador could have been withdrawn in favor of the
military commander as the escalation went into effect. Then the CIA chief
should have been relegated to the Fourth Force role he should have in a wartime
situation. As late as the end of 1963, every U.S. Army combat soldier in
Vietnam (excepting a few assigned to such offices as the legitimate MAAG
section - as differentiated from the oversized cover MAAG section) was under
the operational control and direction of the CIA. It was only after the
beginning of real escalation that the Army soldiers under Army generals began
to take over certain roles and missions and areas in Vietnam. They never did
take over full responsibility for what was called a "war". One reason
for this was that there never was a real honest to God military objective of
this war. There never has been in Vietnam that objective, which when achieved
by military force, would have spelled victory. There never has been that battle
which, if won, would assure victory. Of course, the counterinsurgency
supporters have said, "That's the nature of this type of warfare. You
can't beat insurgents that way." That is nonsense. When a nation is ready
to demand from its people fifty-five thousand lives and more than $200 billion
of its wealth as a contribution to some foreign action, it should at least have
an objective that can be achieved in a tangible manner so that one can tell
when it has been reached or when such attainment is beyond reach. What has
happened in Vietnam is that the CIA got in over its head, and the Army was sent
in to attempt to bring some order out of the chaos that existed there after the
assassination of President Diem. Only then, when the Marines and the Army
arrived, were troops serving under the actual command and direction of their
generals.

One
of the real reasons the Army got in there in the first place was because when
the Marines came in they refused to take the field under the CIA. By that time,
General Krulak, formerly the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and
Special Activities on the Joint Staff, and then commanding general of Fleet
Marine Forces, Pacific, knew too much about the CIA and its activities to
permit his Marines to hit the beaches of Indochina under any command other than
Marine and the U.S. Military Command, Vietnam.

Kennedy
undoubtedly saw the beginnings of this serious problem after the Bay of Pigs
investigation. At that time he wrote two very powerful National Security Action
Memoranda, NSAM 55 and NSAM 57. Both were issued from the White use in June
1961. NSAM 55 was a brief memorandum of greatest significance, which was
addressed directly to the Chairman of the JCS and was signed personally by the
President. In essence it said that Jack Kennedy would hold the chairman
(Lemnitzer) responsible for all action of a military nature during peacetime in
the same manner as he would hold him responsible for such action in time of
war. In other words, the President was saying that he wanted any and all peacetime
operations (military type-clandestine, covert, paramilitary, etc.) to be under
the control, or at least under the close scrutiny, of the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs. One way to interpret this in light of the then current events would be,
"No more Bay of Pigs." This was a powerful memorandum, which set
forth Kennedy's views without equivocation. It was in fact more positive as an
action against the non-addressees than it was for the addressee, the JCS.

General
Lemnitzer, a fine soldier of the old and traditional school and one of the best
administrators to serve after World War II, did not take advantage of this
memo. He knew exactly what it meant, and he did not intend to abuse it. The
best way he knew to have no more Bay of Pigs disasters was to have no more Bay
of Pigs. He noted the memo, had the Joint Chiefs of Staff "Red
Stripe" (formally approve it), then filed it for future use, if needed. As
far as that old soldier was concerned, that memo meant there would be no more
clandestine military operations in peacetime and that such things as Indonesia,
Laos, Tibet, and the Bay of Pigs were a thing of the past.

I was
the officer responsible for briefing this paper to General Lemnitzer and to the
other Chiefs of Staff, and that NSAM rested in my files. There need be no
misunderstanding about what the memo meant, what the President meant, what
Lemnitzer understood and did, and what the other Chiefs of Staff understood.

This
was an unusual memorandum because Kennedy sent it directly to the chairman and
sent information copies only to McNamara, Rusk, and Allen Dulles. It should
also be noted that Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and Allen Dulles knew that NSAM
well and understood its full meaning and intent; and they knew exactly what
President Kennedy meant by it. In other words, President Kennedy by the
explicit publication of this brief memo was letting the entire top echelon
superstructure above the ST, wherever it existed, know that from that time on
there were to be no more such ill-conceived, inadequately planned, and
inherently dangerous clandestine operations. If this directive had been
followed explicitly and if Kennedy had lived to assure that it was followed as
he intended it to be, there is a very good chance that United States
involvement in Indochina would never have been escalated beyond the
military-adviser level. He had learned his grim lesson at the Bay of Pigs, and
as his directive made clear, he Was not going to become involved in that type
of operation again. If evidence of this is needed, consider how he handled the
missile crisis in Cuba a year later. Once he had been convinced of the gravity
of the situation, he directed the mobilization of sufficient troops overtly,
and challenged the Cubans and the Soviets to comply with his demands. He respected
the proper employment of military power and had seen how undercover military
power fails.

The
second memorandum, NSAM 57, though issued at the same time, was signed, as most
NSAMs were, by a member of the NSC staff for the President. Coming as it did paired
with NSAM 55 there could have been no misunderstanding that it carried the same
thrust as NSAM 55, and that it fully expressed the views of President Kennedy.
This memorandum was much longer, and it gave much more detail. [It may be
worthwhile to note that both memoranda were very well written, exceeding by far
the usual bureaucratic language of such papers in style and clarity. The writer
- Sorenson? - was certainly more than one of the run-of-the-mill memo writers.
Since the Pentagon Papers seem not to have contained these memoranda, it may be
some time before we can learn who wrote these excellent and extremely
significant papers for the President.]

Following
the policy of the National Security Act of 1947 and of such other directives as
NSCID 10/2 and later NSCID 5412/2, it recognized that there might be
requirements for clandestine activity from time to time. Then it went further
than those earlier directives and became much more explicit. It said that any
small and truly covert type of operation "may be assigned" to the CIA
and that any which were larger would be the subject of special study and
planning and then "may be assigned" to the military, that part of the
military which would be sufficient only to carry out that one operation on a
one time basis. It directed that large covert operations would not be assigned
to the CIA.

This
attempt at clarification provided the opportunity for the CIA and its fellow
travelers with a chance to blow up the balloon. They counterattacked with a
long and drawn out argument about what was a "small" operation and
what was a "large" one. They then proceeded to argue about what
happens if the Agency goes into some country with a small operation, and then
it expands. At what point will the CIA operation be transitioned from the CIA
control to the military solely on the basis of size, since it might be assumed
that it might or might not have remained covert. The CIA armed that if it
remained covert, regardless of size, no such transition of direction could take
place. The whole point of the CIA argument was to invalidate the President's
controlling mechanism, which depended upon a scale of size.

This
started some very long and heated arguments, and as often happens, since the
real career military such as Lemnitzer had very little interest in this subject
anyhow, the well drilled opposition made quite a bit of headway. After all the
dust had settled, it began to appear that except for NSAM 55 which Lemnitzer
had let remain in the file (his being of the it ­can't-happen-here school),
Kennedy's directive had been turned into an encouragement to the CIA to go out
and start small fires and count on the military to bail them out. This may seem
an odd conclusion - almost funny - but it is exactly how we got into Vietnam in
spite of the directives from the White House. The ST is perfectly capable of
turning a No into a Yes by its gift of irrepressible argument.

I
have quoted the ranking U.S. Army officer who worked in the office of the
Secretary of Defense, with reference to his definition of the term
"counterinsurgency". Now I shall add a few lines written almost
exactly one year after the NSAM 57 arguments about how big and when to
transition to the military, and which take on a special meaning in this relationship.
In this one critical year here is exactly how the fight came out: "A
successful counterinsurgency strategy requires, therefore, the integration of
all U.S Government activities in the country concerned, under the central
leadership of the ambassador. . . or, if the local situation had deteriorated
to the point where the U.S armed forces are actively involved, the military
area commander." In this special sense, read "deteriorated" to
mean "expanded beyond the ability or desire of the CIA to continue to be
involved". This is exactly what was happening in Laos at about this same
time. The CIA had become overextended, and things were going very badly. The
CIA wrote a letter to the Secretary of Defense, asking relief or suggesting the
abandonment of the Meo tribesmen whom they had been supporting.

Recall
how the trouble in Vietnam started. The CIA had been involved in a great number
of brush fire operations there for a number of years in one way or another
since the OSS days of 1945. These raged out of control, becoming a general
conflagration by the end of 1963. At that time there Were more than sixteen
thousand American military personnel there, more or less in the ostensible role
of advisory personnel; but all of these were under the actual direction of the
country team, which meant that they were under the operational direction of the
CIA. (Some parties may wish to deny this in an attempt to maintain the fiction
of those earlier days; but the early general officers who were serving in
Vietnam at that time were either serving with the CIA under the cloak of CIA or
were closely affiliated with the CIA, such as the Special Forces. One more bit
of operational evidence is offered by the combat intelligence available in
those days. There was none of the real military kind. What was there was a form
of CIA village network intelligence, which on most counts was dependent upon
the native population. Even as late as the attacks on the villages in the My
Lai complex, it was the Agency intelligence functionary who told the military
to attack.)

On
the "when to transition" concept it will be noted that even ten years
later and after the escalation of military manpower had reached the staggering
figure of 550,000 men - to say nothing of gross amounts of civilian manpower -
the central leadership was never transitioned to the military as President
Kennedy's NSAM 57 had ordered. If anyone ever wanted an example of how far the
ST can turn things around, this is one of the best. In June 1961 the President
stated one thing categorically; by 1962 the Army's spokesman (actually in Army
uniform; but a CIA/ST spokesman) had totally turned this around in his
counterinsurgency doctrine and definition. Then, after President Kennedy died,
the ST retained control of most of the Vietnam war from its earliest birth
pangs to the peak of escalation. Even to this day the combat phase of the
Vietnamese war, which is called "pacification" and which in fiscal
year 1972 cost more than $1 \ billion, is totally under the direction and
control of the CIA.

The
key to all of this, the matter that made it so easy for the ST to wrest control
of this major peacetime "covert" operation, even from the hands of
the President and Commander in Chief, lay in the words of the Army general
quoted above: "The JCS have recently established within the Joint Staff a
special staff section dealing exclusively with the problem of
counterinsurgency." This was a carefully designed move, and it emerged
from a formative series of events. Almost from the time of the creation of the
CIA, the Secretary of Defense had maintained on his immediate staff an
Assistant to the Secretary for Special Operations. Among other things, this man
was charged with the responsibility for liaison with the CIA, NSA, Department
of State, and the White House. His area of interest was almost totally within
the field of clandestine operations, although he was interested in routine
intelligence matters and other related functions. For the five or six years
prior to the Kennedy inauguration, this office was filled by an extremely able
and wise figure, a retired four-star Marine general, Graves B. Erskine. He ad
served in that capacity longer than any man had ever served in the 0 ice of the
Secretary of Defense at such a level of responsibility. Hi tenure had covered
service under Charles Wilson, Neil McElroy, Thomas Gates, and for a brief
period, Robert McNamara. As he was utilized by the secretaries prior to
McNamara, he kept a close eye on all CIA operational activity that involved the
military in any way, and whenever in his judgment things were going too far he
would inform the Secretary, and in most instances the CIA would be asked to
drop its request for military support, which generally was tantamount to
halting the project. Erskine's role was one of considerable quiet power; yet he
used it sparingly. Then shortly after U.S Air Force Colonel Edward G. Lansdale
came back from Saigon, where he had been working for the CIA ever since the
establishment of the Diem regime and immediately before that had been in Manila
during the selection and establishment of the Magsaysay regime, he was assigned
to General Erskine's office at the specific request of Allen Dulles. Along with
a number of other CIA agent cover "plants" in the Office of the Secretary
of Defense, Lansdale provided a strong counterfoil to his boss, General
Erskine, within the military departments, where he was known, except to a few,
only as an Air Force officer on the Secretary of Defense staff. (By 1961 the
CIA, partly as a function of the vast U-2 project, was widely and deeply
entrenched in the DOD.)

When
McNamara became Secretary, he was advised that he really would not need an
Assistant for Special Operations. He abolished that office. Then many of the
old office staff were dispersed, especially in one sudden move the day after
the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation. Those who were left moved to a new
location in a new office, which was then headed by General (recently promoted)
Lansdale. During this period, I had been assigned to the Erskine staff and was
performing a rather special function, which I had been doing for about five
years before in the Pentagon, but in a different staff location. Shortly after
the new Lansdale office had been established I was asked by General Earle
Wheeler, then the director of the Joint State, if that function would not be
better applied if it were moved from OSD to the Joint Staff, so that it might
he applied uniformly for all the services and for the many major military
commands overseas. He discussed this further with McNamara. In a most unusual
administrative maneuver, required because of the stringent limitations of the
size of the Joint Staff, my office was transferred from OSD to the Joint Staff,
along with the necessary manpower spaces and authorization to staff the office
with representatives of all services and administrative support. This small
staff was joined later by another highly classified group, which performed a
somewhat related function. Then, as a progression of this first move, the Joint
Staff created an office called the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and
Special Activities (SACSA). This new office was much larger than the original
office that had moved down from OSD, and it brought with it a large staff of
CIA oriented personnel from all services. It had several temporary special
assistants, among them General Hemtges and General Craig, before it acquired
its greatest and most dynamic driving force, U.S. Marine General Victor H.
Krulak.

The
important thing to understand is that the much-heralded office of SACSA had
very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented. Most
of its dealings with the services were in areas in which the CIA was most
active. For example, the great proportion of its dealing with the Army was
strictly limited to Special Forces activity. With the Air Force it was for the
most part limited to Special Air Warfare activity, and with the Navy it was
active in the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. There were other duties of course;
but most of them gave the office something it could say it was doing while it
performed its primary task of supporting the CIA, the ST, and of breathing life
unto the massive Frankenstein called counterinsurgency.

SACSA
played another very important role in the highest level policy discussions of
this country. It has been said that Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam in
1963 but deferred it "until after his re-election", as he told
Senator Mike Mansfield, because such a move would stir up a "McCarthy (Joe)
wave of sentiment" and would lose him the support of the JCS.

The
JCS Kennedy knew best was the voice of SACSA. The one officer he saw from the
Joint Staff more than any other during those crucial days was General Krulak.
(See how often Krulak's name appears in the Pentagon Papers, and then see if
the name of General Dean ever appears. Technically, General Dean should have
been the action man - he was the operations director of the Joint Staff-but
General Dean was not the CIA! ST man.) This was because Allen Dulles and Maxwell
Taylor (at that time the military advisor to the President) opened the door for
Krulak, since Krulak's job was to "support the CIA". General Krulak's
closest advisors were such men as Bill Bundy, a long-time career CIA man on
McNamara's staff at that time; General Lansdale, and other key CIA agents and
high officials, whose names will be omitted because some of them are still
active. (Some of these highly placed officials were so deeply covered that it
is possible that no one in OSD, including Krulak, knew that years ago they had
been planted by the CIA. Thus, when he worked frequently with a man in the
Department of Research and Engineering, from whom he had been told he could get
some assistance, it is quite possible he never knew the man he saw was from
Dulles's office.)

Later,
when Maxwell Taylor had become the chairman of the JCS, the only JCS John
Kennedy knew was even more CIA biased, since Maxwell Taylor himself was by that
time more oriented toward the ST than the military, and Krulak was closer than
ever to the President.

Thus
it was not the real military that Kennedy would have offended if he had
withdrawn from Vietnam in 1963. It was the chameleon STICIA military who made
him think they would have objected, and who made him think that they represented
the military. In this special sense the creation of SACS A and the appointment
of Maxwell Taylor as Chairman of the JCS were most influential events. It is no
wonder ST writers have made so much of the great importance to them and to the
CIA, of SAC SA. A careful reader of the Pentagon Papers will see how well
documented all of this is, especially if he observes how many "JCS"
papers were actually not bona fide JCS papers but were in reality SACSA/STICIA
papers, attributed only to the JCS.

As important
to the ST as SACSA was, of equal importance was the return to the government
and especially to the Pentagon of Maxwell Taylor. After the Bay of Pigs, it was
inevitable that Allen Dulles would leave the CIA. His chief lieutenant, Dick
Bissell of U-2 fame and of Laos and Bay of Pigs infamy, left the Agency to
become the head of the Institute of De fen se Analysis, an organization with
many interesting functions - among them acting as a conduit for CIA activities.
Dulles again showed that uncanny ability of his and of the Agency's to rise
above each fiasco on to new heights. During the Bay of Pigs inquiry he
ingratiated Maxwell Taylor to the Kennedys so firmly that Jack Kennedy assigned
General Taylor to the position of Military Adviser to the President. This was a
good cover assignment for General Taylor. For those who thought he might be
interfering with the duties and prerogatives of the chairman of the JCS, this
assignment caused a few raised eyebrows. Dulles and Maxwell Taylor were content
to let those rumours and fantasies spread because they did much to help
transfer some of the blame for the Bay of Pigs from the CIA to the military.
However, everyone else in the need-to-know clan knew that Maxwell Taylor was in
the White House to be the President's liaison man with the CIA. The President
may not have known how closely Maxwell Taylor's aspirations and those of Allen
Dulles matched each other. During the last days of the Dulles era, Maxwell
Taylor served as the Focal Point man between Dulles and his Agency and the
White House.

This
was a perfect role of Maxwell Taylor. He had quit the Army in a dispute with
the Eisenhower Administration and now he was in an ideal position to encourage
with all support and haste the urgent development of the new flexible response
army, attuned to the trumpet of Taylor's own choosing - counterinsurgency. All
the pieces were coming together, and during this formative period a new special
group was formed. This was the Special Group (of the NSC), Counterinsurgency,
better known as the Special Group CI or CI. This group presided over the CIA,
State and Defense Departments, and others, who hastily put together a host of
counterinsurgency nations. It was a watch list, which varied from time to time
as intelligence inputs rose and fell with the tides of international events.
The Special Group CI list usually ran to about sixteen or seventeen countries,
in the order of how deep they were along the path to insurgency and decay. It
is worth noting that although the automatic target of CI was Communism, not a
single "Communist" country, including Cuba, was on the list. It was
characteristic of the new ST focus that the United States was to intervene in
the affairs of its friends and not in the affairs of Russia's friends or of
China's friends.

This
game as it was then played in Washington was a most serious business. As
countries were added to the list their military aid programs were hastily
escalated, and literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of American military
personnel of all types descended upon them. Sometimes they arrived in uniform
and sometimes in civilian disguise. They went to work immediately in support of
the new political-social-economic doctrine, and before long new schools were
being built - by the army; new hospitals were being built - by the army; new
farming techniques were under way - by the army; irrigation and water
purification projects were under way, - again by the army. Underlying all of
the paramilitary and sometimes real military work was the CIA, working with the
host government to weed out, to identify, and to categorize all of the
subversive insurgents. In countries where the word Communism had never been
applied to bandits, beggars, and rebels before, all of a sudden all opposition
was given the name "Communist". All the problems were attributed to
Communists, and the counterinsurgency action was under way.

These
rather amateurish activities were met with all kinds of receptions in the
various host countries. Some were cool to this love-your-­army doctrine. Some
were stunned. It was pretty bitter medicine for many countries, where hatred
and fear of the army had been traditional, to find the Americans coming in with
a program designed to make the army into local heroes according to the
Magsaysay formula of a Robin Hood game. But what were they - the Colombians,
Congolese, Laotians, Jordanians - able to say in the face of American
"goodwill" and concern? It did a lot of good for the
"do-gooders" of counterinsurgency action in the U.S. Government, and
if nothing else it served to quickly coalesce the ST. The next move, as SACSA
and the Agency consolidated their power and influence in the White House and in
the DOD, was to propose the "logical" move of General Taylor to the
Pentagon to become chairman of the JCS. As soon as this was accomplished, the
Army actively threw itself into the Special Forces mould and set out to win
back its position of number one on the defense team.

Thus,
all of these pressures and behind-the-scenes efforts piled up before Vietnam,
and came to a head in Vietnam. As we have said before, the logistics equipment
in huge amounts from Indonesia, Tibet, Laos, the Bay of Pigs, and many other
operations all began to accumulate in Vietnam along with the ST personnel, who
saw an opportunity to accomplish, almost with abandon, all of the things that
they had failed to do or had been unable to do before.

While
this was going on quietly and quite subtly before his eyes, President Kennedy
did a lot of talking with many old hands about "what has gone wrong with
the Bay of Pigs" and "what is the meaning of Vietnam". As has
been ably reported by many good writers, President Kennedy was forming his own
opinion of what was going on, and the evidence is that he was quite close to
the facts and to a real evaluation of what was happening. One of Kennedy’s
closest friends, Kenny O'Donnell, reports that General MacArthur had
"stunned" the President in 1961, after the Bay of Pigs, with his
warnings about the folly of trying to match Asian manpower and about the
absurdity of the domino theory "in a nuclear age." O'Donnell further
reports, "The General implored the President to avoid a U.S. military
build-up in Vietnam, or any other part of the Asian mainland...." And Mary
McGrory, a reporter, has said, in words more truthful and important than she
knew, "President Kennedy, who at the time was caught up in the
counterinsurgency mania which had swept the New Frontier, was subsequently
startled by the passionate objections of Mansfield. But he told Mansfield privately,
after a White House leadership meeting, that he agreed with him "on a need
for a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, but I can't do it until 1965 after I
get re-elected".

Kennedy
had the misfortune, which he was overcoming rapidly, of being young and inexperienced
in the inner ways of government, such as those employed by the ST. He could not
have realized that Maxwell Taylor, for example, by the time he had returned to
the Pentagon as chairman of the JCS, was actually more of a Judas goat, as far
as the military was concerned, than the leader of the herd, as he had been when
he left three years before. Few great armies have been so vastly demoralized
and stricken by an integral campaign as has the U.S Army since those dark days
of 1964 and 1965, when Maxwell Taylor and his ST counterparts led them into
Vietnam under the banner of counterinsurgency.

Vietnam
is not a simple thing. There were many new forces at play there. It had always
galled the Navy and the intelligence community the way General MacArthur had
dominated the Pacific during World War II and then later in Korea; and in so
doing, he had gained the complete upper hand over all of his adversaries in the
U.S military, especially over "Wild Bill" Donovan of the old ass.
They were violently jealous of him. Admiral Radford, who had been Commander in
Chief, Pacific Forces, objected strenuously to any decision that would make
Southeast Asia an Army theater of action as MacArthur had made the Korean
action an Army show. Radford supported the CIA and Lansdale when they moved
into Saigon from Manila. For other reasons the Navy and the CIA had the full
support of Cardinal Spellman, since he strongly urged the installation of a
Catholic in the President's office in Saigon, and Ngo Dinh Diem and his family were
pillars of the Catholic Church in Indochina.

Businesses
that had been all but knocked out of the defense contract arena by the end of
the Eisenhower regime - some by the sudden and abrupt swing to ballistic
missiles and space during the late fifties - saw new light at the end of the
tunnel in the resurgence of the foot-soldier army and the ground warfare this
new dogma presaged. They could expect to go back to making World War II type
munitions again and dumping them on the shores of Asia. Perhaps the strongest
support for the Vietnamese war has always come from the national defense
industries, which benefited tremendously by this windfall. The helicopter
industry, which was on the ropes in 1958-59, became a major supplier of war
material for Vietnam. At the beginning of the war in Vietnam the Air Force had
very few aircraft that could carry a respectable t age of bombs - not because
the planes could not carry the load, but be use they had all been designed to
carry nuclear weapons. As the war became a bombing war - what McNamara called
the "sophisticated war of the North - all of these huge bombers had to be
refitted to carry bombs, and the huge munitions industry put back to work
manufacturing bombs. There were many periods in the early days of the bombing
when the Air Force actually ran out of bombs while the industry was getting out
its old tooling and delivering World War II weapons again.

This
war halfway around the world was a major bonanza for the transportation
industry and especially for the air transportation groups. During peak years,
the DOD was spending three quarters of a billion dollars on charter airlift for
Vietnam alone.

In
the services, military personnel who saw forced retirement facing them during
the sixties were looking at the inevitable retirement as majors, lieutenant
colonels, and colonels, until a whole new vista opened with the new plan and
its return to a ground war of massive troop strength. Men who had lingered in
the grade of lieutenant colonel got their colonel's eagles and some of them
leap-frogged by way of the Green Berets and CIA recommendation to become
brigadier general, major general, and even lieutenant general. There were so
many diverse interests, which all came together in the springtide of Vietnam
and grew and grew from under a cloak of classification and secrecy. It would be
interesting to discover how men like Lansdale, Peers, Dupuy, Stilwell, Tolson,
Rosson, and so many others had served with the CIA and also made rapid
promotions to the grade of brigadier general and higher as a result of the CIA,
Special Forces, and Vietnam. The list is long, and mostly comprised of the men
who are listed in the Pentagon Papers, including of course a great number of
civilians in the same category.

Few
people realized how some of these operations got started, and how important
some of these seemingly small things were in the escalation of Vietnam. The
Agency brought a squadron of helicopters down from - Laos, and immediately
these complicated machines needed a great number of skilled men to support
them; then these vast agglomerations of men and machines created their own
requirements for additional men to protect them and to feed, house, and support
them. The first helicopters came in under the wraps of secrecy. No one seemed
to know how they got there; but once they were there the great logistics tail
that was essential to keep them Operating had to be built in the open, without
classification. It could not have been kept secret, even if anyone had tried.

On
top of this, since the ST was running the beginnings of the war from
Washington, they felt that every gimmick they could dream up was worth a try.
Even before the escalation, this plan to build up the action in Vietnam was
foreshadowed and preordained by official military-type ST doctrine, which
stated: "These natural advantages [of the guerrilla] can be largely
neutralized by the imaginative employment of modem technological advances which
military research and development have been perfecting since the last war. . .
night vision devices, lightweight body armor, portable radar for infantry use,
invisible phosphorescent dyes, defoliants to deprive the guerrillas of their
jungle cover; fast lightweight, silent, shallow-draft boats for river patrol,
and tiny reliable short-range radios. . . . Practical uses for all these new
developments can best be found by establishing combat development and test
centers in the country where the counterinsurgency campaign is being
waged."

Such
centers were set up later in Vietnam and proved to be the modem counterpart of
the horn of plenty and the runaway Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
The center in Saigon was given the highest priority to send daily messages to
the Pentagon, and from there every single request, large and small, important
or unimportant, was given a high priority to be carried out, all on the
assumption that each and every request of the CDTC (Combat Development Test
Center) would help win the war of counterinsurgency. The floodgates were open
for the zealots, the irresponsible, and the special interests. Such things make
small wars grow fast.

The
CIA was the first in Vietnam with helicopters. It introduced the M-16 rifle
there, and it brought into Indochina the B-26 bombers left over from Cuba and
Indonesia and the T -28 trainer aircraft modified as a ground­-attack plane. It
had the first L-28 utility aircraft, and it brought in the old C­46, C-47 and
C-54 aircraft of World War II vintage. It introduced many new ships, such as
the Coast Guard patrol ships and the Norwegian-built PT boats. It used the U-2
and had the use of the product of the RF-l05 reconnaissance planes. Many of the
battlefield tactics used later by the army were first used in the field by the
CIA.

By
the middle of 1963 it had become evident that either the President was going to
have to step in and put a halt to the spread of this counterinsurgency
conflagration or it would consume the country. Everywhere the young Kennedy tea
turned, they came up against CIA and ST specialists. With the sage and powerful
General Erskine gone from the staff of the Secretary of De fen se, his
replacement in this type of activity was either Bill Bundy, a long-time CIA
man; Ed Lansdale, a long-time CIA man also, or others too numerous to mention
and so well concealed (such as those who really sent the U-2 out on that
fateful May 1 mission) that the unaware McNamara had no defense against their
continuing pressures. Even in the office that he thought would give him some
buffer between the Agency and the military - that special office in the Joint
Staff - SACSA, McNamara was getting almost 100 percent CIA action, and when
Maxwell Taylor became Chairman even his efforts were expended more in support
of the ST, as he saw it, than in regular line military.

This
was most discernible to those of us who had been in the Joint Staff for some
time. In the days of other chairmen, such as Twining and Lemnitzer, JCS
meetings used to be wide-open, entirely professional, and generally
constructive. This is not to say there were not some strong differences and
stronger language when such men as Arleigh Burke the Chief of Naval Operations,
or Curtis Lemay, the Air Force chief, did not see eye to eye. In any case, they
were marked by discussion. They were not dominated and controlled by the chairman.
Then, when Maxwell Taylor became chairman, the meetings were somber and apt to
be a one-man show. Little was ever said by any of the Chiefs pro and con when
he was in attendance; but let Taylor be away and the meeting then be chaired by
another man, the meetings would be open again.

These
top military men who had known Taylor for years, had seen him leave the Army in
a huff and had watched him return to the White House, where he cast his lot
with the CIA and the S T. They knew that even though he was among them
officially as the chairman, he was no longer one of them. He was leading the
Army and certain elements of the Navy and Air Force away from their traditional
roles and into an opportunistic and uncertain future with the CIA and the ST -
into the orgy of Vietnam.

We
have seen earlier that President Kennedy's directive NSAM 57, which laid out
the ground rules for covert operations and broke them down on the basis that
very small was for CIA and the larger ones must be reviewed and probably
assigned to the military, had been so turned around that it had become, in
practice, almost meaningless on the intangible issue of when to transition from
the CIA to the military. To demonstrate how totally this directive has been
circumvented, we should note that there has never been a transition in Saigon,
even when the force strength stood at 550,000 men. How large does a peacetime
operation have to get before the CIA is told to give up its more than
intelligence and more than clandestine operations role? How long before the
ambassador is withdrawn? before it is placed in the hands of the professional
military commanders?

We
have not seen what had happened to NSAM 55, the memo Kennedy had sent directly
to General Lemnitzer. The General filed that memo and used its silent power to
assure that the military would not become involved in covert operations. When
Maxwell Taylor became the chairman, he inherited this power. As a prime mover
of the inner and security-cloaked ST, he now had the scepter of greater power
in his hands. Whereas the President had called upon the chairman of the JCS to
advise him in peacetime as he would in wartime, now he had appointed an adviser
who was with the other side. The CIA knew that Taylor would not advise against
them any more than Lansdale and Bundy would, up in McNamara's office.

Therefore,
with the move of Maxwell Taylor to the chairmanship of the JCS, the ST had
checkmated President Kennedy on both NSAM 55 and NSAM 57. As the country moved
into the crucial summer of 1963 the President admitted to his closest
confidants that he could not move against the right-wingers and the ST. As he
told Senator Mansfield, "I can't do it until 1965, after I'm
re-elected." And as he told Kenny O'Donnell, "In 1965, I'll be damned
everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out
completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red scare on our
hands." Then in a broadcast on Sept. 2, 1963, President Kennedy gave a
hint of his plans for disengagement when he said, speaking of the Vietnamese,
"In the final analysis it is their war. They have to win or lose it."
Then, as Mary McGrory says, "But Kennedy, like the two presidents who have
followed him, was a captive of the Saigon Government." It is typical of
reporters and other researchers to give such limited conclusions, because even
as close as they are to the Government they are unable to get behind the screen
of secrecy and see how the ST really works. Not only was Kennedy captive of the
Saigon Government but he and the Saigon Government were captives of the ST.

As we
look back to the beginning of this narrative and to those remarkable papers
called, quite incorrectly, the Pentagon Papers we recall that early in October 1963,
only one month after the above cited broadcast, McNamara and Ma well Taylor
reported to the President that it looked to them, after their visit to S . on,
as though things could be put under control and that we would be able withdraw
all personnel by the end of 1965. Now we can see why they chose that date. This
was the date the President had used in his own discussion with his closest
advisers. They all knew that he planned to announce a pull out once he had been
re-elected. Less than one month after that report, the men who had been running
South Vietnam since they had been placed in power there by the American CIA,
along with Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu, were dead, and the government had
been turned over to one of the friendly generals who more properly fit the
pattern for counterinsurgency and the new plan. If South Vietnam was to be
redeemed it would best be saved by a junta of benevolent army generals - or so
the new military doctrine went.

Less
than one month after that date, President Kennedy himself had been shot dead in
Dallas. And what is even more portentous, it was less than one month after that
tragic date that the same two travelers, McNamara and Taylor, returned again
from Saigon and reported to a new President that conditions were bad in South
Vietnam and we would have to make a major effort, including American combat
troops and a vast "sophisticated" clandestine program, against the
North Vietnamese.

The
ST struck quickly. While the echo of those shots in Dallas were still ringing,
the ST moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the
activity of the United States of America.

In
the face of these shocking and terrifying events, who could have expected a man
who had been in the range of gunfire that ended the life of his predecessor, to
make any moves in those critical days that would indicate he was not going to
go along with the pressures which had surfaced so violently in Dallas? He knew
exactly what had happened there in Dallas. He did not need to wait for the
findings of the Warren Commission. He already knew that the death of Lee Harvey
Oswald would never bring any relief to him or to his successors.